Samsung Wallet now available with Stitch

Following the official launch of our digital wallets solution, Stitch now offers Samsung Wallet alongside Apple Pay and Google Pay, enabling our clients to accept payments from customers in one click online using their Samsung smartphone wallet.  

With our wallets solution, we can automatically detect the device your customers are using and display the appropriate digital wallet payment method.

What is Samsung Wallet? | Digital Wallets

Samsung Wallet is Samsung’s mobile payment and digital wallet offering. It allows users to make payments from compatible Samsung devices such as smartphones and smart watches - including in person via contactless payment or online with a one-click payment experience.

Samsung Wallet and other forms of smartphone-based digital wallets provide a potentially significant opportunity for retailers. As we have noted in the past, contactless payments are growing quickly in South Africa and have reached an adoption rate of 50% - the highest in Africa. However, online digital wallet payments remain relatively underexploited by e-commerce merchants.

Digital wallets like Samsung Wallet enable secure, one-click purchases on online stores, significantly reducing the friction involved when paying online while retaining high levels of security.

Samsung Wallet, similarly to Apple Pay and Google Pay, allows users to store payment information, such as card details or loyalty cards, on their device. This enables them to complete transactions using biometrics or a password to authorise the payment, without the need to enter card details manually.

What sets Samsung Wallet apart is the fact that it also makes use of Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST), enabling users to make in-person payments even where a merchant is not set up for contactless payments. 

How does Samsung Wallet work?

Completing a transaction is simple: when making a payment, a customer simply chooses Samsung Wallet as their preferred payment method and verifies their identity using their smartphone’s security code, or via fingerprint or facial recognition. No need to enter details or authorise via 3DS, ensuring a more seamless payment flow.

When a user initiates a payment, the merchant must call, authenticate and retrieve the user’s card details from Samsung. This then gets bundled with other transaction and meta data such as the payment amount, and then passed onto the card rails to be processed just as a card payment would be.

Doing this requires managing the relationships with both Samsung Wallet and the payment gateway. Stitch streamlines this process so the merchant doesn’t need to manage multiple relationships themselves. With one integration, we can enable any popular digital wallets and manage as much or as little of the end-to-end process as they require.

With Stitch, the payment process is consistent across all platforms, from native mobile applications, to the web, all via one integration.

What are the benefits of accepting Samsung Wallet?

The primary benefit of Samsung Wallet for consumers is convenience – the reason one-click payment methods have seen a rapid increase in adoption rates both in South Africa and globally is that they offer a fast and convenient payment option that does not require customers to spend time re-entering card details. Enabled by fingerprint or facial recognition, it’s also a secure way to pay that lowers fraud risk.

For businesses, particularly given the reach of Samsung devices in South Africa, a primary benefit is greater reach and the ability to offer their customers more, and more convenient, ways to pay.

Crucially, Samsung does not charge additional fees to businesses looking to offer Samsung Wallet.

How secure is Samsung Wallet?

Samsung Wallet uses tokenisation to encrypt and store the information needed to make card payments, making it arguably more secure than carrying a card itself, as none of the customer’s personal financial information is stored on the device. Samsung Wallet leverages Samsung Knox, a defence-grade mobile security platform developed by Samsung.

In addition to the tokenisation built into the platform, Samsung Wallet also makes use of the devices’ biometric authentication capabilities, allowing users to verify transactions as they happen and providing an extra layer of security. Again, this is arguably more secure than traditional cards, as someone can guess a pin number but cannot imitate a face or fingerprint.

How to get started with Samsung Wallet

As discussed in our recent piece on digital wallets, offering Samsung Wallet usually requires managing two integrations – one with the payment processor and another with Samsung Wallet itself as the wallet provider.

Stitch makes this easy by allowing businesses to offer all major digital wallets, as well as a variety of additional payment methods, through a single integration, saving significant development and engineering resources. We also offer a convenient SDK bundle, making the integration process significantly simpler.

As well, Stitch continually updates its platform, keeping existing integrations up to date and adding new ones as they become available.